1. Field
The present disclosure is directed to technology for monitoring software in a computing environment.
2. Background
The growing presence of the Internet as well as other computer networks such as intranets and extranets has brought many new applications in e-commerce, education and other areas. Organizations increasingly rely on such applications to carry out their business or other objectives, and devote considerable resources to ensuring that they perform as expected. To this end, various application management techniques have been developed.
One approach involves monitoring the infrastructure of the application by collecting application runtime data regarding the individual software components that are invoked in the application. This approach can use agents that essentially live in the system being monitored. For example, using instrumentation of the software, a thread or process can be traced to identify each component that is invoked, as well as to obtain runtime data such as the execution time of each component. Tracing refers to obtaining a detailed record, or trace, of the steps a computer program executes. Traces can be used as an aid in debugging.
Typically, some type of report is presented to the user based on the results of tracing. This information should be presented to the user in an easily understanding manner. If the information is too detailed, it can be difficult for the user to determine exactly where the problem is. Even if not too detailed, the information might not provide for quick visualization of the problem. For example, the tracing information may collect data from software applications that run on different computing devices. In some cases, different entities are responsible for maintaining the different software applications. For example, one entity might maintain a web server application that receives user requests, whereas a different entity might maintain a backend database. It can be useful for the user to be able to quickly ascertain whether the problem (e.g., slow execution) is happening at the web server or backend database such that the proper entity may be contacted.